Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Mesh Matrix II 550BE Wins PC Advisor Best Buy Award!

The accolades keep rolling in for Mesh Computers at the moment, with the Mesh Matrix II 550BE winning the PC Advisor Best Buy Award. The Verdict was that "The Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA offers unbeatable value and class-leading performance. If you want a gaming PC for less than £500, nothing else here comes close."

Systems at this price point always involve compromises - a meaty processor or a powerful graphics card will obliterate a £500 budget. But the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA not only achieves the highest WorldBench 6 real-world speed score of the group, it also provides staggering gaming performance that leaves the competition stuttering and flickering in its wake.

We were somewhat surprised to find an AMD CPU under the hood of our Best Buy machine, and the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA's 3.1GHz Phenom II X2 500 BE marks a turn-around for our previously Intel-dominated PC charts.

All the systems reviewed here feature ATI graphics cards, but the Mesh Matrix II 550BE PCA's HD 4870 outclasses the competition and takes gaming to a new level of performance.

Mesh Matrix II 5870XT wins PC Pro Recommended!

It may be a mere six months since ATI launched the Radeon HD 4890 as its single-GPU flagbearer, but the HD 5870 wasted no time in usurping it last month. The new card deservedly won a place on the A List on its PC Pro debut, and Mesh is the first manufacturer to include it in its Matrix II 5870XT PC.

This tantalising specification resulted in excellent gaming performance. In our 1,920 x 1,200 very high quality Crysis test, for instance, the Mesh returned an impressive average framerate of 39fps. More demanding tests didn’t faze the card, either; in fact, only a mammoth 2,650 x 1,600 test at very high settings caused the HD 5870 problems – it only managed 24fps – but you'll only reach that resolution if you shell out a lot more on a huge 30in TFT. Nevertheless, it’s an excellent performance that’s only marginally bettered by recent PCs we've reviewed with dual GPUs.

Partnering this groundbreaking GPU is a 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor, one of the most powerful quad-core parts in AMD’s range. It may not be as revolutionary as the graphics card, but the Mesh still delivered an excellent result of 2.03 in our suite of application benchmarks.

This score may not see the Mesh challenging its A-Listed competitors for raw power – the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire used an overclocked Intel Core i5 chip to score 2.45 in our benchmarks – but the Matrix II is still one of the fastest AMD-based systems we’ve seen and offers more than enough speed to cope with demanding applications.

Mesh has packed 4GB of RAM, a 1TB hard disk and a Blu-ray drive into the Matrix II 5870XT, to ensure there’s plenty of space for large media collections, as well as the capacity to play high-definition movies.

It's all crammed into the popular NZXT Hush case. It may not look as sleek or feel as sturdy as other favourites such as the Antec Nine Hundred Two, but the Hush’s main strength is noise prevention: layers of sound-absorbing foam and dozens of rubber washers keep vibrations and hums to a minimum.

The result is a system that, while far from silent, is relatively quiet for such a powerful beast. The Akasa Nero CPU heatsink and that graphics card cooler mean there’s a constant whirr from the side of the chassis but, thankfully, it’s kept to a manageable level and is unlikely to prove distracting.

The chassis is neat and tidy elsewhere, with bundles of cables lashed together and out of sight, although the bulky components mean working inside is tricky. The two spare DIMM sockets are very close to the Akasa Nero, for instance, and adding a new hard disk into one of the four empty, tool-free bays will likely require removal of the graphics card.

Outside the case, Mesh has included decent peripherals. The Iiyama ProLite E2407HDS offers a full-HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, with solid image quality, especially when handling lighter tones –although we did notice backlight bleed at both the top and bottom of the screen. The choice of Logitech Deluxe 660 wireless keyboard and mouse is good, although perhaps lacking the precision demanded by serious gamers.

With all the power inside, we assumed the Mesh would tip the scales above £1,000 but it comes in at a reasonable £912 exc VAT. This looks good value when stacked up against its A List competition. The £869 Mesh Elite Ice 5 Pro can't match the Mesh for gaming prowess, while the two graphics cards of the £1,199 Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire proved barely faster for that wedge of extra cash.

It’s this combination of price and performance that makes the Mesh so tempting. It may fall slightly behind some rivals in our 2D tests, but it's still a very fast machine, and its gaming performance is top class without resorting to a giant graphics card that sounds like a Hoover. If you’re searching for a cutting-edge gaming rig that doesn’t break the bank, the Mesh Matrix II 5870XT is flavour of the month.

Thursday, 1 October 2009

MESH Matrix II 5870XT wins PC Advisor Recommended award

Review time again, and this time its the MESH Matrix II 5870XT which has picked up a PC Advisor Recommended award. Featuring a ATI Radeon 5870 HD graphics card, and powered by AMD's flagship CPU, PC Advisor has lauded it as a supremely fast gaming PC costing less than £1,000.

No other sub-£1000 PC they've seen had come anywhere close to the MESH Matrix II 5870XT's level of gaming performance, with the Radeon 5870 HD propelling it to over 40fps on the HQ Crysis test - that's at least 10fps faster than the best of the rest.

With the exception of nVidia's hugely expensive GeForce GTX 295, this new single-GPU graphics card stomps all over anything else on the market today, including AMD's former champ, the twin-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2.

No other sub-£1,000 system we've seen so far can come anywhere close to the MESH Matrix II 5870XT's level of gaming performance. The Radeon 5870 HD propels it to speeds of 40fps in our high-quality Crysis test - at least 10fps faster than the best of the rest can muster.

Furthermore, this is currently the only graphics card capable of forthcoming titles such as DiRT2 from Codemasters. These will push the 5870 still further ahead of the competition in both performance and image quality. You'll also be able to use Microsoft's DirectCompute 11 API, allowing the graphics card to take on other duties more effectively, such as seamlessly converting video for use on your portable media player. Older cards are limited to DirectCompute 10.0 or 10.1.

A total of four monitor outputs include a pair of DVI ports as well as both HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, all of which (thanks to AMD's ‘Eyefinity' feature) can be used simultaneously to enable ultra-high resolution multi-screen gaming. However, our review MESH Matrix II 5870XT PC is supplied with a single 22in Iiyama full-HD monitor (for £50 more you can get the 24in monitor pictured).

Housed in a black brushed-aluminium NZXT Hush system case, the MESH Matrix II 5870XT PC remains quiet. This is thanks to a sound-insulated interior which dampens the soft whirr of the specially selected cooling fans inside.

The Asus M4A79XA EVO mainboard comes with two x16 PCI-Express slots supporting an upgrade to dual graphics cards using CrossFireX. Two sticks of DDR3 RAM provide a total of 4GB - with a pair of empty slots of upgrades.

Our WorldBench result of 126 points reveals general application performance to sit at the lower end of what we'd expect from a similarly priced PC based on Intel's Core i7 920, so while the MESH Matrix II 5870XT offers exceptional value for gamers, those hungry for the ultimate overall performance may wish to spend a little more for a faster processor.

Verdict

The MESH Matrix II 5870XT is powerful, well-constructed and built with quality components, but the Radeon 5870 HD takes it to a whole new level of gaming performance at an affordable price.